In Yahoo Mail you can open a message in a new tab, while in Windows Live Mail you can hide the list of messages. But, by default, both sites devote much less to email's content than Gmail. As a comparison, Mozilla Thunderbird uses 51.3% from the window size to display message. So, although Yahoo Mail Beta and Windows Live Mail try to look similar to a desktop application, they neglect an important aspect: how easy is to read mail?

Note: These numbers were obtained using the default settings and 1280x800 resolution.